NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THECONCEPT OF LANGUAGE AS A SYSTEM

'OU TOUT SE TIENT'

E.F.K. KoernerUniversity of Ottawa

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;All just supply, and all Relations.

Gohn Donne in 1611)

ABSTRACf

It is still customary, at least among textbook writers, to attribute the def-inition of language as 'un systeme au tout se tient' to Saussure eventhough no one has ever found a locus of this famous phrase in theCours. This seems surprising wIlen we also find that both Bally in 1932and Trubetzkoy in 1933 refer explictly to the phrase as being Saussure's.Many scholars have found this state of affairs puzzling, if not frustrat-ing. This paper is intended to explain the reasons for the attribution toSaussure. It is important to remember that Saussure wrote only onemajor book in his life-time, the Memoire sur Ie systeme primitif desvoyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (published in Leipzig, in1878), and that during 1881-1891 he taught at the Ecole des HautesEtudes in Paris, where Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) was one of his stu-dents. Teaching on Indo-European linguistics Saussure used theMemoire as a textbook; indeed, a second edition of the volume ap-peared in Paris in 1887. From Saussure's papers it is clear that he in-tended to add an answer to his critics, but was dissuaded by his col-leagues from doing so; it is also important to note that Saussure re-ferred to the Memoire as 'man Systeme des Voyelles'. Shortly afterSaussure's departure for Geneva, Meillet started to build up his owncareer, of which his 1893-1894 articles on 'Ies lois phonetiques' and'I'analogie' were the first major statements. It is in the first of these twowhere Meillet, not surprisingly, used the famous phrase for the firsttime, without explicit reference to Saussure or the Memoire. However,from 1903 onwards, in his Introduction 11 I'etude comparative deslangues indo-europeennes, which Meillet explicitly dedicated toSaussure on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication ofthe Memoire, we find Meillet using tIle phrase quite frequently andalways either directly or implicitly in reference to Saussure's 1878 book,and never to the posthumous Cours. However, it is clear from all thecircumstances sketched in this paper that the concept, if not tIle phraseitself, derives from Saussure's linguistic thinking and was dissemi-nated tllrough his students in Paris.

L1NGUISTICA atlantica 18/19 (1996/1997) 1-20

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O. PRELIMINARY REMARKS

E.F.K. KOERNER

I may be permitted, in a brief contribution to a special issue of this peri-odical in honour of our distinguished confrere, to start with a couple ofpersonal observations which usually do not find entry into the regularscholarly record. I am hoping, however, that on this particular occasion Ican count on the editors' indulgence as well as on the laureate's forgive-ness. To be sure, nothing derogatory ad hominem will be said here. On thecontrary, as will become clear from what follows: De amicis nihil nisi bene.

I first 'met' John Hewson early in 1976. He had sent me a paper for pos-sible publication in Historiographia Linguistica, as a response to an articlewhich had appeared in the first number of this journal. Its author had ex-pressed views about the linguistic theories of Gustave Guillaume (1875-1960) which were less than appreciative of his accomplishments. I still re-call that I read Hewson's rebuttal of Wunderli (1974) with great interest,because it offered me not only a fine entree into Guillaume's linguisticthinking, but also intellectual pleasure, as the author displayed an unusualgift for explaining complex matters in an easily accessible manner.Another trait emanating from the paper was what may be called restraint.It was obvious that Hewson, whose doctoral dissertation had been writtenat Laval University under the direction of Roch Valin (b.1918), the leader ofGuillaumean linguistics in North America, was rather annoyed at what heregarded as misinterpretations of Guillaume's teachings. Yet the civilityHewson displayed was remarkable, and ever since I have had many rea-sons to regard this characteristic as the third part of what makes Hewson,the scholar and teacher, in addition to his intellectual and pedagogicalskills.l (I have never been close enough to Hewson to say anything specific

1 In this connection, I'd like to recount a true story which, I believe, is typical ofHewson's pedagogical eros. Both he and I participated at an InternationalColloquium on 'Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology' organized by JacekFisiak of Adam Mieckiewicz University, Poznan, which was held at a formerprincely Polish castle at Rydzyna, some 100 miles north of Breslau (nowWrodaw), 14-17 April 1993 (see Hewson 1996 [1993]). As it so happened, myroom neighbour turned out to be the only other participant from Canada. Asthe sound insulation of the (apparently cheaply installed) partitions was notthe best, at bedtime, when I tried to fall asleep, I could not help hearing astrong manly voice talking and talking and talking. I didn't try to understandwhat the subject of the conversation was, but the next morning I askedHewson what it was all about-I was sure that there was another person pre-sent-only to be told that he had been rehearsing his paper!

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System 'Oil tout se lienl' 3

about 'Hewson the man', but I believe that the three traits enumeratedround out the picture quite well. His professionalism, sense of fairness,and scholarly ethics are known to everyone who has had the pleasure ofcoming into contact with him.)

It was, I think, Hewson the theorist as well as the educator who ven-tured, several years ago now, to enter the long-standing discussion aboutthe-I dare say at the outset: Saussurean-idea that language constitutesa system of interrelated entities (Hewson 1990). But unlike most othersbefore him, he obviously was much less interested in historiographicallytracing and documenting the evolution of an idea-though Hewson wasnever uninterested in history, whether the history of linguistics or the his-tory of language(s).2 Instead, he has generally been much more attractedto investigating 20th-century uses and the general usefulness of a concept,methodological precept, or particular framework.

As is well-known, my own major preoccupation, apart from offeringfora, both in linguistics generally and in the history of the field specifically,has been, for almost thirty years now, what I term 'the historiography ofthe language sciences' or 'linguistic historiography'. What I mean by theseterms is a methodologically sound and intellectually broadly informedmanner of engaging in researching and documenting the res gestae of thedisciplines concerned with language, in my case usually those of the 19thand 20th century, in Europe and America. Given time constraints that havebeen, alas, the bane of my engagements as chief editor of two journals anda handful of monograph series, the only thing I am able to offer our distin-guished colleague at this time is an attempt, in the form of a fairly shortsketch, to present the ways in which the phrase announced in the title ofthis paper evolved since the last quarter of the 19th century. I thus offer aclarification of the question asked by a number of our contemporaries as towhere the 'ou tout se tient' idea emanated from, much less what it has be-come in 20th-century thought, since this job has already been done by JohnHewson himself (1990: 788-793).

1. IN SEARCH OF THE ORIGIN OF 'ou TOUT SE TIENT'

More than a quarter-century ago, William Gamwell Moulton (b.1914),one of the very few direct students of Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1946)-who himself read Saussure's Cours with great interest (d. Bloomfield

2 Recent major publications of his bear out these observations on a much largerscale (Hewson 1996; Hewson & Bubenik 1996).

4 E.F.K. KOERNER

1923)-made the following statement at the outset of a review of fourbooks devoted to Swiss German dialectology, an area in which he had dis-tinguished himself greatly:

It is a tenet of 20th-century linguistics that language is systematic. This has beenexpressed variously in such statements as that language is 'un systeme ou tout setient',l that the grammar of a language is a 'system of rules', and that the use oflanguage is 'rule-governed behavior'. (Moulton 1971:938-939)

Hardly anyone would want to quibble with such an affirmation aboutthe broad use of this idea today. In the present context, the footnote whichMoulton appended to this characterization makes for more interestingreading, and we'll see in what follows the quotation why:

Although the famous phrase is customarily attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure,in a reasonably careful rereading of the Cours I was unable to find it. The earliestoccurrence that I have been able to locate is in Maurice Grammont, Traite dephonetique (Paris, 1933), p.167. Did Meillet also say it? Was Saussure the first tosay it? Can anyone help me?

To be sure, Moulton was neither the first nor the last to have beenfrustrated in his search for this turn of phrase in Saussure's Cours. Apartfrom the common observation one can make, namely that, with rare ex-ceptions, good practioners of the craft tend to be poor historians (if theytake any active interest in the history of their discipline at all), it also seemsthat at least part of the reason for this frustration is due to the long-standing amnesia of American linguistics with regard to European schol-arship, from what Thomas Sebeok once characterized as 'the smug thir-ties' to at least the 1960s, which included a lack of familiarity with or dis-dain for the work of Saussure, Meillet, Trubetzkoy, Hjelmslev and otherEuropean linguists (d. Haugen 1951, for an early critique). Indeed, follow-ing Bloomfield's opus magnum of 1933, we can also notice a considerablelack of interest among his followers in historical-comparative linguistics.(Note that those who were fairly well read in European linguistics andwho kept the subject alive were more often than not refugees from Nazipersecution, not American born.)

Moulton's queries are even more interesting for other reasons, as heseems to have been the first scholar to publicly challenge the traditional as-cription of the phrase 'ou tout se tient' to Saussure. He also suspects thatMeillet used it, and he refers to an author and a book which both are atleast in some way relevant to the subject of this paper: like Antoine Meillet(1866-1936), Maurice Grammont (1866-1946) was a student of Saussure'sin Paris during the 1880s, and the subject of his 1933 book, contrary to what

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System '011 tout se tien!' 5

the title suggests, was devoted to phonology, not phonetics. As regards theurgency with which Moulton expressed his request for help, one cannotbut hope that some reader of his note came to his relief soon after thisfourth 1971 issue of Language was published, probably at exactly the samemoment that I defended my thesis on Saussure which was published fifteenmonths later, with only minor changes, a new preface and an index ofnames (Koerner 1973). In it, Moulton might have found at least a partialanswer to his questions, for it says-in an explanatory footnote to a pas-sage from Meillet's 'Le<;ond'ouverture du Cours de Grammaire compareeau College de France' of 1906, in which the characterization of languageas 'un systeme OU tout se tient' figures quite prominently (Meillet1921[1906]: 16; Koerner 1973: 231):

This phrase defining language as 'un systeme [... ] OU tout se tient' was frequentlyemployed by Meillet and can also be found in the writings of his pupils, notablyin J. Vendryes'. Cf. Meillet's pamphlet, La Linguistique (Paris: Larousse,1916[1915]), p.7: 'Toute langue est un systeme rigoureusement agence ... , tout setient dans Ie systeme d'une langue'. It is interesting to note that Meillet uses thisformulation in connection with Saussure's teaching at Paris (1881-91); Meilletthen was apparently not aware of the fact that Saussure's lectures on general Iin-guistics were about to be published. (Koerner 1973 [1971):240n. 23)

One reason for citing this note is also to defend myself against the accu-sation (e.g., by Szemerenyi 1980: 160) that I had attributed this famousphrase to Saussure, a charge against which Brogyanyi (1983: 143-144) de-fended me, referring in addition to other places in the same book of mineas well as to Koerner (1975 [1972]: 746, 797), a study with whichSzemerenyi was also familiar (d. his review in Phonetica 36.162-165[1979]), in which similar observations had been made. Indeed, followingthe publication of Peeters' 1990 paper, which supplies further evidence ofmy subsequent research into the question (e.g., Koerner 1984, 1987), I thinkthere is no need anymore to publically claim ownership of my originalfindings. (Perhaps I should add that my 1971 dissertation was devoted tothe Cours and its impact on 20th-century linguistic thought, not to hisMemoire; this interest of mine is more evident in Koerner 1987.)

Still, as the record shows, this often-used tournure has received furtherhistorical investigation following Brogyanyi's 1983 paper (Toman 1987,Hewson 1990, Peeters 1990), in part also because the phrase-and theidea-is still widely attributed to Saussure in the critical literature, attimes against Saussure and 'structuralism' generally (d. Brogyanyi 1983:145-146). Even the Indo-Europeanist Oswald Szemerenyi (1913-1996),who was so well familiar with the essential tenets of Saussure's Memoire

6 E.F.K. KOERNER

(Szemerenyi 1973), went so far to regard the phrase as 'absurd' (1980:160).While I do not think that the idea of language as a system of interrelatedterms needs to be defended-I would find it hard to believe that there isany serious linguist around who'd challenge such a view-it seems that amore detailed analysis of the primary sources concerning its early use isstill desirable to set the record straight, and to permit future (careful) usersof this famous dictum the benefit of an historical accounting of its evolu-tion and proper application to the facts of language.

2. ATTRIBUTIONS OF 'ou TOUT SE TIENT' TO SAUSSURE

Brogyanyi (1983) made no menton of his one-time mentor's characteri-zation of this phrase as 'absurd', but he showed (145-146), as I just noted,that some linguists used the quote to criticize (Saussurean) structuralismgenerally as not giving an adequate picture of living languages. Others,who ascribe it to Meillet, not Saussure, like Lepschy (1970:34), remarkedthat when Meillet stated in the preface to his Introduction a l'etude com-parative des langues indo-europeennes that language was 'un ensembleou tout se tient' (Meillet 1903:x), 'he was expressing a commonplace idearather than an original one'.

The key term here (and the source of Lepschy's derision), it appears,was Meillet's use of the word ensemble rather than systeme3 in this pas-sage as the former has a seemingly lengthy tradition in French thought.Bogyanyi (p. 145) quotes the definition which Emile Littre (1803-1881), inhis Dictionnaire de la langue franfaise, had given under the entry of'systeme' (1869: 2119),4namely, as an 'Ensemble de choses qui se tiennent',and which harks back, according to Mounin (1972: 43), to the entry for thesame term in the French Encyclopedie of 1765, which in turn is quoted byWalther von Wartburg (1888-1971) in his Franzosisches etymologischesWorterbuch as an 'ensemble de choses qui se tiennent d'une maniere oud'une autre, considerees SOllS l'angle de leurs relations' (1966: 504).However, Lepschy (b.1935) did not go much further in his investigationsand, as a result, missed Meillet's much more forceful definitions in hismany other, earlier as well as later, writings, including the revealing pas-sage in the 1912 edition of Meillet's Introduction, which was retained in itsmany subsequent editions (see section 3.2 below).

3 Even though the context shows that Meillet in fact used the term 'systemelinguistique indo-europeen' right before the passage Lepschy refers to.

4 Erroneously, Toman (1987: 404) misquotes Brogyanyi (1983) twice when sub-stituting 'systeme' with 'structure'.

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System '011 tOllt se tient' 7

2.1 Early attributions

The earliest reference to Saussure as the originator of the phrase ap-pears to have come, interestingly enough, from the pen of his one-timestudent at the University of Geneva and later co-editor of his lectures ongeneralliguistics, Charles Bally (1865-1947). In the first edition of his in-fluential Linguistique generale et linguistique jranraise Bally noted (1932: 9= 1944: 17): 'Dans un systeme, tout se tient [... ]: ce principe, proclame parSaussure, conserve pour nous toute sa valeur'. This affirmation seems tohave been the source of Nikolaj Sergeevic Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), who inhis programmatic, if not propagandistic, article of 1933, 'La phonologieactuelle', cites the phrase characterizing language as 'un systeme ou toutse tient' altogether four times (Trubetzkoy 1933: 241-244 = 1969: 159-163),each time identifying Saussure as the originator and suggesting (withoutoffering a particular locus-of course) that the phrase in question could befound in the Cours, from which he quoted elsewhere, for instance whenreferring to the following famous phrase from the Cours: 'Les phonemessont avant tout des entites oppositives, relatives et negatives' (Saussure1931[1916]: 164). It seems that on the authority of Bally and then possiblyalso on that of Trubetzkoy, it became fairly commonplace to attribute thephrase to Saussure. Whatever the (secondary or tertiary) source of this as-cription, it seems that the phrase in question fitted well into the argumentof the post-Saussurean linguists who took the Cours as a textbook ofstructuralism rather than as an original attempt at an overall general lin-guistics in which both synchrony and diachrony would find their properplace.

2.2 Later ascriptions

By the 1960s, when linguistics had become a popular subject of univer-sity instruction, the expression of language as a 'systeme OU tout se tient'and its congeners had become widely used in the classroom and in the text-book literature. It was a handy phrase if one was to argue in favour of astructural approach to language. It would probably be useful to check allsorts of modern textbooks to make an accounting of more recent ascrip-tions of this 'tour de phrase'. These are more likely due to a kind of oral,classroom transmission than the result of original research as, for instancein Fishman's 'brief introduction' to sociolinguistics (1970: 9), where hemakes a general reference to the Cours, obviously without having read it.Given limitations of space, reference to just two more places may sufficewhere the phrase is credited to Saussure: in Jan Mulder's Martinet-in-

8E.F.K. KOERNER

spired Foundations of Axiomatic Linguistics (1989: 135) and an article byJacob Mey on 'semoisis', where the author even goes so far as to supply ofa page reference to the Cours,s affirming:

Perhaps one of Saussure's most important (and at least most widely quoted)statements has been that in language, everything holds together: 'dans Ie langage,tout se tient' (1966: 72). The immediate corollary of this statement is that in lan-guage everything is possible, as long as one knows, and sticks to, the rules of thegame, [... ) (Mey 1992:229)

It's obvious that the author has no idea where this phrase has comefrom and in what context it was originally conceived. Still, Mey is largelycorrect in his belief that comparable ideas can be found in the text compiledby Bally and Sechehaye, but not where his reference leads us to, namely, toa discussion of phonetics ('Classification des sons d'apres leur articulationbuccale').6

3. ON THE HEELS OF THE SOURCES OF 'ou TOUT SE TIENT'

It appears to me that most teachers of linguistics did not particularlycare as to where the phrase had come from. Indeed, it didn't really matter.It was a useful way to explain the nature of language structure, and thisusually sufficed. We know of various other instances where concepts or a'joli mot' (as Meillet called Baudouin de Courtenay's 1881 creation of'morpheme' by analogy to 'phoneme') are ascribed to the wrong person.The frequent ascription today of the concept of 'markedness' to Chomsky,and not to Trubetzkoy, is just a case in point, and only historians of lin-guistics may take exception to such misleading claims.? ('Modern linguis-tics' has been particularly successful in 'borrowing' important insights

5 Here and in several other instances lowe such loci to the keen eyes of BertPeeters of the University of Tasmania who was kind enough to send me var-ious reviews of his in which he noted such offenders.

6 In his bibliography (p. 238) Mey refers to the 1916 edition, and so one mayspeculate which edition-or translation?-he might have been referring to.Neither in the first French edition (whose pagination differs from all subse-quent editions) nor in any later edition or, rather, uncorrected reprint is thereanything said on page 72 about this matter; there is not even a mention of'systeme' in either.

7 For a well-researched corrective to this 'now swollen notion', see Chvany(1996). lowe this reference and a copy of this article to Sylvain Patri of theUniversite de Lyon II.

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System 'OIl tout se tient' 9

from others and then obscuring their sources: On presse l' orange et enjette l'ecorce!)

3.1 The circuitous history of lOU tout se tient'

As we have already noted, there appears to be a fairly long list of schol-ars to whom the phrase has been credited. To be sure, the idea of languagebeing a system is not a 20th-century discovery. The organicist view of lan-guage which permeated 19th-century historical-comparative linguisticsimplied that languages were open to systematic analysis. 50 when theFrench lexicographer Littre, an ardent follower of Auguste Comte's phi-losophy of science, by the way, defined 'systeme' as an '[eJnsemble dechoses qui se tiennent' in 1869, he may be said to have done little else thanformulate a generally-held view.

As a result, it was not merely the context in which Littre's definition ap-peared which was probably much less promising and influential thanAntoine Meillet's Introduction a l'etude comparative des langues indo-eu-ropeennes, which first appeared in 1903, was translated into German soonthereafter, and had six more editions during the author's lifetime. It isprobable that most readers of the book used later editions (notably the fifthdating from 1922), by which time the Cours de linguistique generale hadappeared and begun to exert its influence. It would help explain why 20th-century linguists soon began to associate the phrase with Saussure and theCours, and not Meillet and his Introduction-or Saussure and hisMemoire for that matter.

However, as we shall see, Meillet used this now well-known phrasemuch earlier in his career, a whole decade earlier, at least where theprinted record is concerned. This is significant as we shall see later in thepresent discussion. In 1893, when the quote below appeared, Saussure hadreturned to Geneva less than two years earlier, and Meillet, then aged 27,was eager to establish himself as a scholar in his own right. It was no sur-prise that the article was devoted to an expose of the main pillar of histori-cal-comparative linguistic theory and practice since 1876, the question ofthe regularity of sound change as emphasized by the young scholars of theLeipzig circle around Georg Curtius (1820-1885), notably Karl Brugmann(1849-1919) and Hermann Osthoff (1847-1909), precisely during the time5aussure was a student there (1876-1878, 1879-1880). In his paper on 'Leslois phonetiques', Meillet noted:

Les divers elements phonetiques de chaque idiome forment Ull systeme all toutse tient. Les personnes qui ont appris a prononcer une langue etrangere ont pu

10 E.F.K. KOERNER

s'en rendre compte: ce n'est pas seulement parce qu'il prononce mal Ie th ou lesconsonnes finales que Ie Fran~ais est inintelligible en pari ant l'anglais, c'est queni la position des levres, ni celle de la langue ne sont les memes pour parler lesdeux langues, et que pas une seule des voyelles n'est rigoureusement identiquedans les deux. Or I'enfant, en apprenant a parler, s'assimile non une articulationisolee, mais ['ensemble du systeme. (Meillet 1893: 318-319; Koerner 1989: 405; em-phasis added: EFKK)

Two years later, we can read the following in an important and influ-entia1215-page monograph of the phenomenon of 'dissimilation' found inIndo-European languages, by another former student of Saussure's duringhis tenure as Maitre de conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris(1881-1891), Maurice Grammont, where the author holds up the followingprinciple maintained elsewhere by historical linguists at the time:

[... ] si la dissimilation elle aussi obeit a des lois, tout se tient dans l' edifice,I'ensemble est complet et il ne reste qu'a parfaire les details. (Grammont 1895:10)8

As Meillet's 1893 article appeared in a rather obscure place, and not in aregular linguistics journal, it is not surprising that Toman, looking for pre-1903 locations of the phrase, expected to have found reasons to attrributeit to Grammont rather than to Meillet, of whom he only found a later(1899) attestation which, however, was much more detailed and so couldhave been taken as an elaboration on Meillet's part of his confrere's dis-covery. The latter, in a paper published in the prestigious IndogermanischeForschungen, on a fairly minute subject of Indo-European morphology,had given the following argument to explain a particular languagechange:

[... ] tous les mouvements qui concourent a la formation d'un phoneme etant so-lid aires, l'alteration de l'un d'entre eux a chance d'entralner, soit immediate-ment, soit plus tard, I'alteration d'une ou de plusieurs des autres. Du reste cephoneme n'est pas isole dans la langue, il fait partie d'un systeme dont toutes lesparties se tiennent et reagissent les unes sur les autres; [... ]. (Meillet 1899: 64;Toman 1987: 403)

Apart from the fact that Meillet's statement is quite distinct fromGrammont's, we may be safe in assuming, also based on Meillet's earlieruse of the idea, that both had drawn inspiration from the same source,even if later readers might have seen Meillet as its originator, a possibilityToman (1987: 404-405) is willing to consider. Thus, it is interesting to notethat Joseph Vendryes (1875-1960), one of Meillet's first students and not

8 Toman (1987: 404) took this passage as 'the earliest variation on OU tout setient'.

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System '011 tout se tient' 11

much later a close collaborator, should have revisited in a way Meillet's1893 paper. In a programmatic paper on the 'sound laws', published in aFestschrift dedicated to Meillet (on the occasion of what appears to havebeen the 10th anniversary of his teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes),he noted that the change of one phoneme presupposes the change of otherphonemes in the evolution of a given language system ('evolution du sys-teme'): 'L'alteration d'un phoneme suppose l'alteration concomittante deplusieurs autres phonemes' (Vendryes 1902: 116). Even if the 'OU tout setient' phrase itself does not appear in Vendryes' paper, the underlying con-cept is clearly in evidence.

3.2 Getting closer to the sources of 'ou tout se tient'

Given the now widely accepted ascription of the concept and phrase toMeillet, it becomes of interest to the historian of linguistics to look for cluesof their genesis in Meillet's mature work, in particular his influentialIntroduction a I' etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes, pub-lished in a German translation in 1909, a considerable feat givenGermany's preeminence in the field of comparative-historical linguistics atthe time.9 What we could have noted thus far is that nowhere in his writ-ings did Meillet claim ownership to the phrase in question; there is no hintanywhere that he thought he was expressing a novel idea. Where hisIntroduction is concerned, we should note right from the start that thebook carries, on a separate page, the following dedication:

A MON MAiTREFERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

A L'OCCASION DES VINGT-CINQUE ANS ECOULI~SDEPUIS LA PUBLICATION DU

MEMOIRE SUR LE SYSTEME PRIMITIF DES VOYELLESDANS LES LANGUES INDO-EUROPE ENNES

(1878-1903)

As we shall see from what follows, this dedication is much more than apolite gesture of a student to his former teacher; indeed, Meillet was veryconscious of Saussure's influence on his linguistic thinking as may be gath-ered from his obituary of the maitre. Referring to his own contribution to avolume of melanges dedicated to Saussure in 1908, the thirtieth anniver-sary of the publication of the Memoire, in which his former students were

9 In fact, Meillet's reputation had grown so much by then that the University ofBerlin bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in 1910.

12 E.F.K. KOERNER

given an opportunity to indicate 'leur dette vIs-a-vis de leur maitre',Meillet spoke of his own indebtedness in the following terms:

Pour rna part, il n'est guere de page que j'ai publiee sans avoir un remords dem'en attribuer seul Ie merite: la pensee de F. de Saussure etait si riche, que j'ensuis reste tout penetre. Je n'oserai, dans ce que j'ai ecrit, faire Ie depart de ce que jelui dois; mais je suis sur que I'enseignement de F. de Saussure est pour beaucoupdans ce que les juges bienveillants ont parfois pu trouver a y louer. (Meillet1936[1913]: 179)

A possible hyperbole aside, we can be sure that Meillet meant what hesaid. Characterizing Saussure's teachings at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes,Meillet (p. 178) points out that what the student received was of 'unevaleur genera Ie, ils preparaient a travailler et formaient I'esprit; ses for-mules et ses definitions se fixaient dans la memoire comme des guides etdes modeles.' This statement should be kept in mind too. Together with thededication of his Introduction, which was retained in all subsequent edi-tions, Meillet's acknowledgement of the profound impact that Saussurehad on his training as a linguist is, in my view, significant for the resolu-tion of our puzzle concerning the original source of the well-known phraseconcerning the systematic nature of language, of which we find so manyexpressions in Meillet's writings. The following additional locus may suf-fice to illustrate this. In his 1906 inaugural speech as successor to MichelBreal (1832-1915) in the Chair of Comparative Grammar at the Collegede France, Meillet chose to pronounce himself on 'L'etat actuel des etudesde linguistique generale [sic]'. There, speaking about 'la realite d'unelangue', he expatiates:

Elle est linguistique: car une langue constitue un systeme complexe de moyend'expression, systeme au tout se tient et ou une innovation individuelle ne peutque difficilement trouver place si, provenant d'un pur caprice, elle n'est pas ex-actement adaptee a ce systeme, c'est-a-dire si elle n'est pas en harmonie avec lesregles generales de la langue. (Meillet 1921[1906]: 16; emphasis added: EFKK).

Returning to Meillet's Introduction of 1903, we may read in his Avant-propos the following observation which, I believe, should lead us closer tothe source of the idea:

Comme toute autre langue, les differents parties du systeme linguistique indo-europeen forment un ensemble ou tout se tient et dont il importe avant tout acomprendre Ie rigourex enchainement. (Meillet 1903: x = 81937: ix)

Indeed, if a further piece of evidence was needed to demonstrate thatMeillet had not merely comparative-historical Indo-European linguisticsin mind but, specifically, Saussure's Memoire, when he spoke of a lan-

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System 'Or:l tout se tienl' 13

guage as a system of interdependent terms, we may refer to the article'Apen;u du developpement de la grammaire comparee', which Meilletadded to the third edition of his Introduction in 1912. There, after a de-tailed expose of the discoveries made by Saussure in his Memoire (Meillet1937[1912]: 473-474), which established 'd'une maniere definitive la theoriedu vocalisme indo-europeen' (p.473), Meillet comes to the following judg-ment:

[... ] Ie Memoire apportait, par une innovation, un systeme coherent qui embras-sait tous les faits, mettait a leur place les faits connus et en revelait une foule denouveaux. Des lors il n'etait plus perm is d'ignorer, a propos d'aucune question,que chaque langue forme un syslerne au tout se lien I, et un plan general d'unepleine rigueur. (1937[1912]: 474-475; emphasis added: EFKK)

Still in 1915, a year before the first appearance of the essentials fromSaussure's Geneva lectures on general linguistics, Meillet, in a presenta-tion of the state of the art of French linguistics for the San Francisco WorldExhibition, emphatically reiterates the formulation whose genesis hasbeen the subject of my paper, and clearly in connection with Saussure'steachings in Paris, when affirming 'Toute langue est un systemerigoureusement articule [... ], tout se tient dans Ie systeme d'une langue'(Meillet 1916[1915]:7; also quoted in Koerner 1973:240n.23).

3.3 The place of 'system' in Saussure's linguistic thoughtlO

Meillet had noted the following in his review of the Cours de linguis-tique generale which should be kept in mind when pursuing our quest forthe source or sources of this well-known phrase:

[... ) la pensee de F. de Saussure s'etait fixee tres tot, on Ie saito Les doctrines qu'il aenseignees explicitement dans ces cours de linguistique genera Ie sont celles donts'inspirait deja l'enseignement de grammaire comparee qu'il a donne vingt ansplus tot a I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, et que rai rec;u. Je les retrouve telles qu'iletait souvent possible de les deviner. (Meillet 1916: 32; Mounin 1968: 163)

This observation is of importance to my argument as it suggests thatMeillet picked up the idea and probably also the happy phrase duringSaussure's courses in Paris during the 1880s. It was during this time thatSaussure was very much preoccupied with Indo-European linguistics,which was the subject of his courses, but also with defending the findingsof his Memoire which had not yet become widely accepted and, by some in

10 Given space restrictions, this section lacks the kind of detail that I believe anarticle de fond requires to settle the issue once for all.

14E.F.K. KOERNER

Germany, even attacked. Saussure appears to have used the Memoire as atextbook; indeed, a second edition of the volume appeared in Paris in 1887.From Saussure's papers it is clear that he intended to add an answer to hiscritics (notably Osthoff), but was dissuaded by his colleagues from doing so(cf. Redard 1978:34). It is also important to note that Saussure referred tothe Memoire as 'mon Systeme des Voyelles', the first paragraph of whichshould be quoted in full to illustrate the clear-headedness of this twenty-one-year old genius:

Etudier les formes multiples sous lesquelles se manifeste ce qu'on appelle l'aindo-europeen, tel est l'objet immediat de cet opuscule [of 302 pages!): Ie reste desvoyelles ne sera pris en consideration qu'autant que les phenomenes relatifs a. l'aen fourniront l'occasion. Mais si, arrive au bout du champ ainsi circonscrit, Ietableau du vocalisme indo-europeen s'est modi fie peu a.peu sous nos yeux et quenous Ie voyions se grouper tout entier autour de I'a, prendre vis-a.-vis de lui uneattitude nouvelle, il est clair qu'en fait c'est Ie systeme des voyelles dans son en-semble qui sera entre dans Ie rayon de notre observation et dont Ie nom doit etreinscrit a. la premiere page. (Saussure 1879(1878):1; emphasis added: EFKK)

There can be no doubt that Saussure's entire argument is based on theidea of 'system' and the interrelationship between the parts. No surprisewhen in the final paragraph of his Memoire Saussure speaks of 'structureconsiden~e en elle-meme' (p. 283). Indeed, the idea of language as a systemmay be regarded as the fil conducteur of Saussure's entire work in matterslinguistic. Already in his enfantillage (Saussure's term in retrospect) of1872, when he was less than fifteen years old, the schoolboy wrote a 40-page 'Essai pour reduire les mots du Grec, du Latin & de I'Allemand a unpetit nombre de racines' which can be seen as foreshadowing Saussure'slater preoccupation with discovering or building on the assumption of thepresence of 'system' in language.l! In the Cours, Mounin (1968: 61) re-ports, the term systeme shows up 138 times, and if we add Saussure's useof 'organisme grammatical' and similar expressions which he employed assynonyms, we'd probably arrive at an occurence of the concept on everysecond page.

11 In fact, in his reminiscences of 1903 or thereabouts, Saussure (1960: 17) reports:'La marotte linguistique me travaillait evidemment des cette epoque, carje n'eus pas plus tot appris quelques rudiments de grec a. l'ecole, que je mesentis mur pour esquisser un systeme general du langage' (emphasis inthe original).

Notes on the History of the Concept of Language as a System 'Oii lout se lien!' 15

5. CONCLUDING REMARKS

In his 1990 paper, 'Un systeme ou tout se tient: Origin and evolution ofthe idea', John Hewson quoted the following remark by the late JeanStefanini (1917-1985): 'L'idee que la langue est un systeme a toujours eteconsideree par toute l'ecole de Paris, de Meillet a Benveniste, comme l'ap-port fondamentale de Saussure' (Stefanini 1973: 322), elaborating on thisobservation in the following manner (pp. 787-788):

The notion of system is indeed fundamental to all of Saussure's work, both syn-chronic and diachronic; in fact, as Guillaume points out, it is fundamental to thewhole comparativist enterprise (1986: 10). The centrality of the notion of systemin Saussure's work is to be found, in fact, as early as his 1879 Memoire sur lesvoyelles: in that work he proposed a system of three laryngeals entirely on regu-lar correspondence in the Indo-European languages.12

While we may regard this statement as un peu rapide, it summarizesfairly adequately what I tried to expatiate on in this little note, namely,that there is a straight line from Saussure's early comparatist work downto his last lecture on general linguistic theory in the summer of 1911. Thereare definitely not two Saussure's, one of the Memoire, another of theCours, and not only with regard to the notion of 'systeme'. As regards thefears expressed by John Donne concerning the effects of the CopernicanRevolution on 17th-century cosmology (quoted at the outset of this paper),they may not hold where the Saussurean Revolution in 20th-century lin-guistics is concerned, as long as Hewson's (1990) caveats are heeded.

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